An Amateur Performance - (Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy) by Lev Levanda (Paperback)

About the Book

Russia's best Jewish writer in the nineteenth-century, Lev Levanda (1835-1888), is still barely known in the English-speaking world. 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.

Book Synopsis

Russia's best Jewish writer in the nineteenth-century, Lev Levanda (1835-1888), is still barely known in the English-speaking world. 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.

About the Author

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 attended New York University and University of California, Berkeley where he studied Slavic Languages. He holds the Sizeler Family Chair and is professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University. A recipient of many major awards including Yad Hanadiv, Lady Davis, Alexander Von Humboldt, and Fulbright, he is the author of six books including Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years (2020); Russian Idea-Jewish Presence (2013); Empire Jews (2009); and Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia (2009). His present research is focused on the radical right-wing Zionism in the Mandate period.