From the summer of 1913 to the spring of 1914 Sholem Aleichem wrote several film scripts, basically in Russian, that were never published and some of them were lost. The article deals with a short, English-language cinema synopsis discovered among the writer’s papers in the archives of the Tel Aviv Sholem Aleichem House, Little Motl Goes to America, which Sholem Aleichem prepared based on one of the missing screenplays, The Adventures of Lucky Motl. The synopsis was translated into English in 1915 by Ben-Zion Goldberg (who was to become a prominent American Jewish journalist and Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law) at the request of a certain motion picture studio. This contact with the American movie-making industry was broken off and developed no further, but the writer was very active in promoting Motl in the American cinema until the last days of his life. The synopsis provides scholars with a missing link in the genesis of Sholem Aleichem’s well-known work, The Adventures of Motl, the Cantor’s Son.
First publication in English of the Yiddish article on I. S. Turgenev published by Matvei (Mordechai Nisan) Kagan (1889–1937), a Russian philosopher of Jewish origin, in 1919. Kagan praises Turgenev as the first Russian novelist whose novels made Russian literature and culture a part of the world culture. This was a result of what Kagan called Turgenev’s svive-libe – the love for one’s cultural environment characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia that represented the whole people as the living and powerful collective.
The blood libel against the Jews in Trent in 1475, the first of this kind in the Early Modern Times, which led to execution of all Jewish men of the city, caused an investigation initiated by Pope Sixtus IV. The court proceedings of the case, stored in the city archive of Trent for more than half a thousand years, include four private letters written in Hebrew characters, two in Old Yiddish and two in Hebrew. The letters were found in possession of a Catholic priest by the name of Paolo da Novara who was arrested following the blood libel, and initially meant to serve as evidence of his attempts to help the Jewish women imprisoned at Trent make contact with the outside world. Later da Novara was accused of trying to poison Bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach. It seems that the case contains the oldest private letters in Old Yiddish known until the present. Albeit the very fact of their existence was known to researchers, they remained undeciphered, not analyzed and not contextualized. Being a good example of earliest texts in Yiddish in general and evoking a special interest as the earliest representation of a specific “epistolary genre” in particular, they are first of all a rare reflection of the Trent tragedy and some other contemporary blood libels from the Jewish inner perspective.
The article reviews the philosophic-religious heritage of R. Nathan-Neta Olevski, Irkutsk chief rabbi in 1919-30, who became later one of the most prominent Jewish religious figures in the USSR. His collection of responsa, Haye Olam Nata (Who Has Implanted Eternal Life, 1930/1), his only book published in his lifetime, can be considered as the most substantial Halachic work ever written in Siberia that preserved its value for the Orthodox Judaism until today (it was republished three times from 1992-2012, in the United States and Israel). The article is focused on unique information mentioned within R. Olevski’s responsa about “internal life” of various Jewish communities in Siberia during WW1, The Russian Civil War, and the first decade of the Soviet regime.
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