Böcker av Roman Katsman

A hundred years is the period long enough to talk about Russian-Israeli literature as a historically consistent, though quite an indeterminate community. Not being a historical study, Roman Katsman's new book subtly outlines one of the magnetic lines of this community--the search for an answer to the main question of modernity--"what is reality?", as well as the search for the real, which makes the core of the Jewish existence. Today, just like a hundred years ago, the success of this search depends on how well Russian-Israeli literature can overcome fears and temptations of the Russian melancholy and the Israeli marginality. Fighting for its existence in unique conditions, it chooses sophisticated forms of transforming its double cultural unbelonging into the paradoxical philosophical realism that can be perfectly comprehended only today, with the benefits of postmodernism appropriated and left behind. At the same time, despite its peculiar nature, Russian-Israeli literature shares the fundamental trend of the world literature, namely its transition to virtual, web-based, augmented reality.

The studies gathered in the collection present the Russian-language Israeli literature that has been forming over the past hundred years in all the variety of genres and aesthetic movements. In every generation and in every aliyah, Russian-Israeli authors tirelessly search for new forms, born of the encounter with the new land.

Focuses on several Russian authors among many who emigrated to Israel with the "big wave" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They constitute a new generation of Jewish-Russian writers: diasporic Russians and new Israelis.