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November 18, 2005
Dear Board Member,
THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE EPHRAIM URBACH FELLOWSHIPS
This year we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Ephraim
Urbach Post-Doctoral Fellowship program, established by the Memorial
Foundation in 1995, in cooperation with the World Union of Jewish
Studies.
The program, named after Professor Ephraim Urbach, a long time
Vice President of the Memorial Foundation and President of the
World Union of Jewish Studies, provides grants to recent recipients
of Ph.D.’s in a field of Jewish culture who have achieved
superior grades in graduate school, completed their dissertations
with distinction, and who show promise of distinguished academic
careers.
The purpose of the grants is to assist the recipients in publishing
their first book, launching their scholarly careers and supporting
research in their area of special interest. All recipients are
required to present a scholarly paper about their research at
a special session devoted to the Urbach recipients at the quadrennial
Congress of Jewish Studies that takes place in Jerusalem. Professor
Anita Shapira and I have had the pleasure of chairing these sessions
in past years. Leaders of the World Union of Jewish Studies have
advised us that these sessions were among the best held at past
Congresses.
You may view and download from this website
the list of the 33 recipients of the Urbach Fellowships from 1996-2005.
The program and its recipients have been one of the Foundation’s
most impressive achievements. At the next meeting this coming
summer of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees in Jerusalem,
you will have the opportunity to meet some of these outstanding
young men and women and learn about their accomplishments. The
Urbach recipients will undoubtedly be future stars in the creation
and advancement of Jewish culture worldwide.
Professor Mikhail Krutikov
In this report I should like to acquaint you with one exemplary
recipient of this program, Professor Mikhail Krutikov, who like
the others, is doing pioneering research in his field, Russian
and Yiddish-Jewish culture, in which the Foundation has played
an important role over the last three decades.
Dr. Mikhail Krutikov’s current research grows out of his
dissertation, “Representation of Crisis in the Yiddish Novel,
1905-1914” that dealt with the development of modern Yiddish
literature before World War I. He completed his doctoral work
with distinction at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
in 1997.
He is currently exploring the impact of Marxist ideology on Jewish
literary creativity in and outside of the Soviet Union, and the
mediating role of Jewish leftist intellectuals between the East
and the West. He plans to consolidate the results of his research
in a book dealing with an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener,
one of the leading Soviet Yiddish theorists.
Prior to his recent immigration to the United States, Dr. Krutikov
was deeply involved in various forms of Jewish cultural life in
the former Soviet Union. Until Perestroika, this kind of activity
could only be conducted underground. Following his graduation
from the faculty of Mathematics at the Moscow State University
in 1979, he was attracted to the study of Hebrew in clandestine
ulpanim in Moscow. Their weekly evening classes had a unique atmosphere,
combining the excitement of challenging the Communist system with
academic study. With some interruption, Mikhail spent six years
in these seminars, starting with classes for beginners and advancing
to courses in Hebrew grammar. He then became a teacher of Hebrew
himself.
In 1982, a group of Jewish intellectuals from Moscow sought to
revive the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Commission that had
existed before World War I. They believed that the authorities
might tolerate such activity, but they did not, so it was back
to the “kitchen seminars”. By that time, Mikhail,
besides having a reading knowledge of English, Hebrew and German,
realized he could read Yiddish as well. Encouraged to demonstrate
that there were still young Yiddish writers in the former Soviet
Union, Mikhail, with the assistance of Velvl Chernin, the Yiddish
poet, published a few pieces in Sovetish Heymland, which by that
time (1986) was reluctantly starting to tolerate some diversity
of opinion.
After glasnost, the Commission was also transformed into the Jewish
Cultural Association. By that time Mikhail was exploring other
cultural and academic avenues. He was invited to prepare an anthology
of Jewish poetry in Russian for Vek, the first magazine for Jewish
culture after glasnost, founded in Riga. Regrettably, the magazine
ceased publication in 1991. Mikhail hopes he can one day complete
that project and publish it in a format similar to the Penguin
volume of Jewish poetry.
Subsequently, he was recruited to produce Yungvald, a magazine
to attract a young readership to Yiddish. In the fall of 1989,
he also began to study Yiddish at the Moscow Institute of Literature
under Professor Shimon Sandler, a graduate of the Tarbut School
of Vilna and a Holocaust survivor. Because there were no other
qualified teachers of Jewish literature, Mikhail became one himself
and lectured at the Institute.
In 1991, the time during which the demise of the Soviet Union
and the Communist system was taking place, I met Mikhail in Moscow.
He was interested in pursuing an academic career by enrolling
at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York for which he received
Foundation support. Professor Krutikov’s career has been
deeply affected by both the opportunities and challenges that
era provided.
Mikhail’s strengths were not confined to scholarship in
pre- and post-glasnost Russia. He was an active participant in
Jewish communal life as well, both with the Jewish Cultural Association
in Moscow, mentioned earlier, and the VAAD. We also recruited
Mikhail to serve as a member of the faculty of our Russian Nahum
Goldmann Fellowships in the early 90’s, where he performed
brilliantly.
A Bridge Between East and West
In Dr. Krutikov’s view, it will take a decade or two until
we can properly appreciate and evaluate the historical significance
of the developments in Eastern Europe under communist rule and
its impact on Jewish life. As the 20th century fades away into
the past, the entire set of problems related to the Jewish experience
under communism becomes an issue of historical rather than political
debate, losing in poignancy but gaining in depth.
The opening of the archives and the rapid growth of Jewish Studies
in the former Soviet bloc have radically changed the situation
in comparison with a decade ago. Today no scholar in the West
can ignore the stream of publication that comes out of Eastern
Europe, whereas no East European scholar can afford being ignorant
of the achievements of Western scholarship.
Dr. Krutikov’s academic career has been closely intertwined
with the process of convergence between East and West in the Jewish
world. While his academic affiliation has been with British and
American institutions, he is trying to remain part of the academic
community in Russia and FSU. His ambition is to facilitate the
intellectual exchange between East and West, mediating between
the two worlds that still remain to a large degree culturally
and mentally apart.
Writing for a Western audience, he is trying to convey the existential
and intellectual complexity of the situation of Yiddish and Russian-Jewish
writers, critics and intellectuals who made Marxism their faith
and the Soviet Union their home. His teaching and writing in Russian
focus on demonstrating how contemporary Western methodology can
be productively applied to the specific problems of Russian-Jewish
cultural history. At the same time, he is trying to combine an
academic research with a more popular form of cultural journalism
that finds its outlet in his weekly column in the Yiddish newspaper
Forverts.
There is a growing circle of young scholars around the world who
are beginning to share Krutikov’s scholarly interests and
intellectual concerns. It is encouraging to see that Yiddish culture
continues to fascinate young and mature scholars as well as the
broader cultural community in various countries. Recent books
and articles by Gennady Estraikh, who also has received Foundation
support, and others offer refreshing new interpretations of Yiddish
culture as part of modern culture. In Krutikov’s view, the
future of Jewish cultural life in Russia – and indeed elsewhere
– is inseparable from maintaining its status as high culture,
which requires an ongoing discovery and reevaluation of forgotten
treasures.
Dr. Krutikov believes that the future evolution of Jewish culture
is very much affected by the ways in which we view and represent
our past. On the eve of the 21st century, more than one million
Jews from the FSU found themselves on the move. Their migration
to Israel, North America and Germany has already had a strong
impact on the Jewish life in those countries.
In Krutikov’s view, Russian Jews today probably constitute
the most dynamic Jewish community in the world, who will play
an increasingly important role in politics, economics, and culture
in Israel and America. It is of great importance for the Jewish
future that Russian Jewish immigrants have an opportunity to learn
about their own cultural legacy in ways that do no impose any
particular political, ideological or religious agenda. At this
moment, contemporary Russian Jewish cultural life is very active,
but has little presence outside the Russian-speaking community,
due to the lack of mediation between Russian and the other major
Jewish languages, Hebrew and English.
The aim of Dr. Krutikov’s academic research and cultural
criticism is to make the English and the Yiddish speaking audiences
aware of the most recent developments in Russian Jewish culture.
According to Krutikov, given the current introvertive trends in
American Jewish life, it may take years if not decades until the
contemporary Russian-Jewish voices will find their place in the
ever-changing Jewish canon.
The Urbach Fellowship awarded to Professor Krutikov facilitated
expansion of Prof. Krutikov’s intellectual and academic
interests into new areas, broadened his horizons and deepened
his areas of expertise, which eventually enabled him to obtain
his current, tenure-track academic position as professor in Slavic-Jewish
Cultural Relations at the University of Michigan, a role that
perfectly suits the cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary character
of his work.
Dr. Krutikov has previously served as Lecturer in Yiddish Literature,
Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies; Lecturer in Yiddish Literature,
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London;
and Visiting Fellow, The Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew
University.
Since receiving the Urbach Fellowship in 1998-99, Prof. Krutikov
has authored: Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity,
1905-1914, Stanford University Press, 2001 and co-edited
with Gennady Estraikh: Yiddish and the Left, Oxford:
Legenda, 2001; The Shtetl: Image and Reality, Oxford:
Legenda, 2000; and Yiddish in the Contemporary World,
Oxford: Legenda, 1999, as well as 17 articles dealing with Yiddish
and Russian Jewish culture.
With intellectuals like Mikhail Krutikov in the vanguard of this
effort to build a bridge in Russian Jewish cultural studies between
the East and West, the future of this enterprise appears exceedingly
bright.
Warm regards,
Dr. Jerry Hochbaum,
Executive Vice-President
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