JQR 113.4 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

In their essay “Hebrew Gomel: Space, Genre, Modernity” (JQR 113.3) Natasha Gordinsky and Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan focus our gaze on fin de siècle Gomel, a small majority-Jewish city in the Pale of Settlement that produced an outsized share of literary genius.

JQR 113.3 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

Barry Wimpfheimer shows that the Mishnah stacks legal couplets like building blocks to produce ever-richer conceptual understandings and train the reader to mine it for such meaning.

“Any minute now the world streams over its border” (Ot-ot gist zikh shoyn iber di velt bizn rand). So writes Soviet Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, a single resonant line among the hundreds in his eighty-page poem The Man of Forty (Der fertsikyeriker man), which his wife smuggled out of Stalinist Russia in a potato sack in 1949. Had she not done so it would surely have been seized by Stalin’s agents, who were moments from arresting the dissident poet when she departed.