An Amateur Performance (Paperback). Questo articolo non è disponibile.An Amateur Performance (Paperback)

Translated for the first time in English, Lev Levanda's brilliant coming-of-age story of Russian Jewish students on the cusp of modernity in their struggle against religious chauvinism and an oppressive government.

Russia’s best Jewish writer in the nineteenth-century Lev Levanda (1835-1888) is still barely known in the English-speaking world today. His famous novel from 1873, Seething Times, has still not been published in its entirety. Here for the first time is one of his major novels in his entirety, An Amateur Performance (Reminiscences of a Student in the 1850s, translated with elegance by Hugh McLean and edited by Brian Horowitz and Conor Daly. This work from 1882 describes the rush by Jews to the government schools, secular education, and the lights of enlightenment. At the same time Levanda shows the truth: students with no preparation, confusion over the new ideas, and the repressive power of the Russian government. Levanda recounts his own struggles, risks, creative vitality in the goal of making a script that the schoolboys would perform, despite the dangers from the authorities.

In essence it’s a sociological study of Russian Jewry in the 1850s as remembered by a writer who fought for progress, Jewish integration and development, and who ultimately paid for his goals with his life.

Lev Levanda was born in Minsk. He studied in a local Jewish school and a rabbinical school in Vilna, after which he took a teaching job in Minsk, where he also assisted with editing state textbooks for Jewish children. He began to write articles and fiction in the early 1860s for various Jewish publications in Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Vilna. While he was an assimilationist rather than traditionalist at the beginning of his career, he later became a proponent of Jewish self-defense during pogroms, critic of extreme assimilation, and spokesperson for early Zionism. Levanda’s best known work is the novel Seething Times (1873), which depicts the Jewish response to the Polish uprising of 1863.

Brian Horowitz grew up in Roslyn, NY. He attended New York University (B.A.) and University of California, Berkeley (M. A., PhD.), where he studied Slavic Languages. He holds the Sizeler Family Chair and is professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University. He is the recipient of many major awards including Yad Hanadiv, Lady Davis, Alexander Von Humboldt, and Fulbright. He is the author of six books that include Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years (2020); Russian Idea-Jewish Presence (2013); Empire Jews (2009) and Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia (2009). He is presently working on the radical right-wing Zionism in the Mandate period. In an earlier time, he was a scholar of the poet, Alexander Pushkin as well as Russian intellectual history. In recent days he has published in popular newspapers such as the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Mosaic, and Jewish Review of Books. In addition to his 60+ original articles, he has written 100 book reviews for journals in Israel, Germany, Russia, and the United States.