NAS Blog

Via Professor David Gordon, president of NAS’s New York affiliate, an announcement specifically for NAS members:

THE NEW YORK ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS

THE CUNY ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS

INVITE YOU TO ATTEND OUR SECOND EVENT OF FALL 2009

Emil Draitser

will discuss his recent book

Shush!

Growing Up Jewish Under Stalin

Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word “Jewish” — even in casual conversation — he lowered his voice. This behavior was a natural product, he realized, of growing up in the anti-Semitic, post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when “Shush!” was the most frequent word he heard: “Don’t use your Jewish name in public. Don’t speak a word of Yiddish. And don’t cry over your murdered relatives.”  This compelling memoir conveys the reader back to Draitser’s childhood and provides a unique account of mid twentieth-century life in Russia as he struggled to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family.

Draitser, today a professor of Russian at Hunter College, in addition examines Odessa’s social fabric as exemplified in film, literature, humor, headlines, holidays and vernacular to offer valuable, poignant snapshots of this turbulent, terrifying time in a work that one reviewer called “whimsical, heartfelt and candid,”  and another found “a wonderfully evocative memoir of childhood and adolescence during one of the most tragic epochs in Russian history. As grim as the historical background of the memoir is, the mood is redeemed by Draitser’s perfectly Odessan Jewish humor, sad yet optimistic, compared with that of another great Odessan, Isaak Babel.”

December 13, 2009 3:00 PM

at the home of Nahma Sandrow and Bill Meyers

180 Riverside Drive. apt 3A

Entrance on West 90 Street
New York, NY

RSVP  – David Gordon    (718) 289-5658      dmgordon@mindspring.com