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Beyond the Pale (Extend your Knowledge)

Although we did not set out to write an academic work, we consulted a wide variety of sources for background and information.  Ever the teacher, Meryll feels the need to highlight a different book or author each month to encourage readers to dig deeper into the themes of Jewish Luck.  You will find our entire bibliography below. We would enjoy conversation with you about books you love on Russia, Sweden, immigration, Soviet Jews—fiction or non-fiction.  Contact us and we’ll create a blog with reader suggestions.

FEATURED BOOKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albats, Yevgenia.The State within a State: The KGB And its Hold on Russia Past, Present, and Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,1994.

Alexander, Robert (pen name for RD Zimmerman). The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar. New York: Viking Press, 2003.

----------- Rasputin’s Daughter. New York: Viking Press, 2006.

----——— The Romanov Bride. New York: Viking Press, 2008.

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, and Paul Goldberg. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post Stalin Era. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1990.

Althaus, Frank, and Mark Sutcliffe, eds. Petersburg Perspectives. London: Fontanka, 2003.

Altshuler, Mordechai. “Some Statistical Data on the Jews among the Scientific Elite of the Soviet Union.” Jewish Journal of Sociology, 15 no. 1 (June, 1973): 45–56.

Ålund, Aleksandra, and Carl-Ulrik Schierup. Paradoxes of Multiculturalism. Brookfield, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 1996.

Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg Gordievsky. KGB: The Inside Story. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990.

Ashwin, Sarah, ed. Gender, State and Society in Soviet and post Soviet Russia. London: Routledge, 2000.

Azbel, Mark Ya. Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981.

Backstein, Joseph, Ekaterina Degot, Boris Groys,and Olga Sviblova. Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s. London: Haunch of Venison, 2010.

Barnes, Andrew. Owning Russia. The Struggle over Factories, Farms, and Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Beckerman, Gal. When They Come for Us We’ll be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Beizer, Mikhail. The Jews of St. Petersburg. Excursions through a Noble Past. Translated by Michael Sherbourne. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.

Berliner, Joseph S. Factory and Manager in the USSR. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Bruni, Attila, Silvia Gherardi, and Barbara Poggio. Gender and Entrepreneurship. London: Routledge, 2005.

Buckley, Mary, ed. Perestroika and Soviet Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Bonnell, Victoria. “Russia’s New Entrepreneurs” in Victoria Bonnell and George Breslauer, Russia in the New Century: Stability or Disorder. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.

Bridger, Sue, Rebecca Kay, and Kathryn Pinnick. No More Heroines? Russia Women and the Market. London: Routledge, 1996.

Brown, Archie. The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Buckley, Mary, ed. Post Soviet Women from the Baltic to Central Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Clowes, Edith W. Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post- Soviet Identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Cohen, Stephen F. Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post- Communist Russia. New York: WW Norton, 2000.

———. The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin. Exeter, NH: Publishing Works, 2010.

Cook, Linda J. “Brezhnev’s Social Contract and Gorbachev’s Reforms.” Soviet Studies 44, no. 1 (1992): 37–56.

Eaton, Katherine Bliss. Daily Life in the Soviet Union. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Edmondsom, Linda, ed. Gender in Russian History and Culture. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001.

Engel, Barbara Alpern. Women in Russia: 1700–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Etzioni-Halevy, Eva, and Zvi Halevy,. “The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Achievement.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 19 no. 1 (June, 1977): 49–66.

Field, Mark G., and Judyth L. Twigg. Russia’s Torn Safety Nets. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Froese, Paul. The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Gaidar, Egor. “From Central Planning to Markets: Transformation of the Russian Economy” in Conversations with History video series. Berkeley: Institute of International Affairs, University of California. Recorded on November 26, 1996.

Gessen, Masha. Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace. New York: Dial Press, 2004.

———. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

———, ed. Half a Revolution: Contemporary Fiction by Russian Women. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis, 1995.

Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of Russian History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

———. Jewish History Atlas. New York: Collier Books, 1969.

———. The Jews of Hope. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.

———. Russian History Atlas. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.

Gitelman, Zvi. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: Yivo Institute, 1988.

Goldman, Marshall. Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

———. What Went Wrong with Perestoika. New York: WW Norton, 1991.

Gorokhova, Elena. A Mountain of Crumbs. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

Goscilo, Helena, and, Stephen M. Norris. Preserving Petersburg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Grekova, I. (Yelena Sergeyevna Ventsel). “The Hairdresser” in Russian Women, Two Stories. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983.

Hoffman, David E. The Oligarchs. Wealth and Power in the New Russia. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.

Iossel, Mikhail. Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life. New York: WW Norton, 1991.

Isham, Heyward, and Natan Shklyar, eds. Russia’s Fate through Russian Eyes: Voices of the New Generation. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.

Jacoby, Susan. Inside Soviet Schools. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Kamali, Masoud. Distorted Integration: Clientization of Immigrants in Sweden. Uppsala: Uppsala Multiethnic Papers, 1997.

Karlovna, Evelina Vasilieva. The Young People of Leningrad. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences, 1975.


Keep, John. “Gorbachev Era in Historical Context.” Studies in East European Thought 49 no. 4 (December 1997): 271–86.

Klier, John D., and Shlomo Lambroza. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Klimontovich, Nikolai. The Road to Rome. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2004 (part of Glas New Russian Writing, #35).

Klugman, Jeffrey. The New Soviet Elite. How They Think and What They Want. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989.


Kochan, Lionel. The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Koval, Vitalina, ed. Women in Contemporary Russia. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995.

Kotkin, Stephen. Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. New York: Modern Library, 2009.

Lapidus, Gail Warshofsky. Women in Soviet Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Ledeneva, Alena V. How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Lovell, Stephen, Destination in Doubt: Russia since 1989. London and New York: Zed Books, 2006.

———. Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha 1710-2000.Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003.

———. The Soviet Union. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Mandelbaum, Michael. “Political Reforms Caused the Collapse of the Soviet Union” in The Break up of the Soviet Union, William Barbour and Carol Wekesser, eds. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1994.

Matisoff, James A. Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-ostensive Expressions in Yiddish. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Matthews, Mervyn. Education in the Soviet Union. Policies and Institutions since Stalin. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982.

Medvedev, Roy. On Soviet Dissent. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

———. Post Soviet Russia: A Journey through the Yeltsin Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Miller, Jack, ed. Jews in Soviet Culture. London: Transaction Books, 1984.

Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar New York: Knopf, 2004.

Morawska, Ewa. Insecure Prosperity: Small Town Jews in Industrial America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Morozov, Boris. Documents on Soviet Jewish Emigration. London: Frank Cass, 1999.

National Intelligence Estimate [CIA] “The Deepening Crisis in the USSR: Prospects for the Next Year.” 4: 11-18-90, November 1990. Available from https://www.cia.gov/library/ center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books- and-monographs/at-cold-wars-end-us-intelligence-on-the- soviet-union-and-eastern-europe-1989-1991/16526pdffiles/ NIE11-18-90.pdf

Oettingen, Gabriele. “Explanatory Style in the Contest of Culture” in G. M. Buchanan and M. E. P. Seligman, eds. Explanatory Style, 209–23. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.

Oren, Dan A. Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale., 173-214. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

Orttung, Robert. From Leningrad to St. Petersburg: Democratization in a Russian City. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Overy, Richard. Russia’s War. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

———. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. New York: WW Norton, 2004.

Penninx, Rinus, and Judith Roosblad. Trade Unions, Immigration and Immigrants in Europe 1960-1993. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.

Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. Jews in the Russian Army 1827–1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Pinkus, Benjamin. The Jews of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

———. The Soviet Government and the Jews. 1948–1967. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Popov, Vladimir. “The State in the New Russia (1992–2004) from Collapse to Gradual Revival? PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Russian Security) Policy Memo 342. Washington, DC: Russian and Eurasian Program at the Center for Strategic International Studies, November, 2004.

Pred, Allan. Even in Sweden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Prozorov, Sergei. The Ethics of Postcommunism. London: Palgrave- Macmillan, 2009.

Pryce-Jones, David. The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995.

Pushkareva, Natalia. Women in Russian History. Translated by Eve Levin. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997.

Rabe, Monica. Living and Working in Sweden. Göteborg: Tre Böcker Förlag, 1994.

Rai, Shirin, Hilary Pilkington, and Annie Phizacklea, eds. Women in the Face of Change. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. London: Routledge, 1992.

Reid, Anna. Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944. New York: Walker, 2011.

Remnick, David. Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia. New York: Random House, 1997.

Rhodes, Richard. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas. A History of Russia, 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Robinson, Christina Johansson, and Lisa Werner Carr. Modern Day Viking: A Practical Guide to Interacting with Swedes. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 2001.

Robinson, Logan. An American in Leningrad. New York: WW Norton, 1982.

Roi, Yaacov, ed. Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Essex, UK: Frank Cass, 1995.

Rosenberg, Chanie. Women and Perestroika. London: Bookmarks, 1989.

Roxburgh, Angus. The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Rusinek, Alla. Like a Song, Like A Dream: A Soviet Girl’s Quest for Freedom. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1973.

Sachar, Howard Morley. The Course of Modern Jewish History. New York: Dell Publishing, 1958.

Salisbury, Harrison E. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Sawyer, Thomas E. The Jewish Minority in the Soviet Union. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979.

Sebestyen, Victor. Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.

Shevtsova, Lilia. Lonely Power. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010.

Sholom Aleichem. The Adventures of Menahem Mendl. Translated by Tamara Kahana. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1969.

Shtern, Ludmilla. Leaving Leningrad. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001.

Shturman, Dora. The Soviet Secondary School. Translated by Philippa Shimrat. London: Routledge, 1988.

Silberman, Charles. A Certain People: American Jews and their Lives Today, 51-57. New York: Summit Books, 1985.

Simon, Gerhard. Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.

Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. New York: New York Times Books, 1983.

———. The New Russians. New York: Random House, 1990.

Spufford, Francis. Red Plenty. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2010.

Stotland, Ezra. The Psychology of Hope. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969.

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004.

Taylor-Gooby, Peter, ed. Welfare States under Pressure. London: Sage Publications, 2001.

Ulitskaya, Ludmila. Sonechka. New York: Schocken, 2005.

Varese, Federico. The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Veidlinger, Jeffrey. Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime. New York: Free Press, 1998.


Volkov, Solomon. St. Petersburg: A Cultural History. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Volkov, Vadim. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Wilmers, Mary-Kay. The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story. London: Verso, 2010.

Wiseman, Richard. The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles. New York: Hyperion Books, 2003.

Wright, Rochelle. The Visible Wall: Jews and Other Ethnic Outsiders in Swedish Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.

Zimmerman, R. D. Blood Russian. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987.

 

———. The Cross and the Sickle. New York: Kensington, 1984.

———. The Red Encounter. New York: Avon Books, 1986.

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We were featured speakers at Hadassah Brandeis Institute and Levy Summer Series. Our speaking engagements include JCCs, synagogues, libraries, book groups, retirement communities, schools, and organizations (e.g. ORT, Hadassah, and Women's League). References are available. 

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Talk Review

"I was very fortunate to be able to hear Meryll and Leslie speak at a Hadassah event in Israel. Each of the ~50 participants really enjoyed the event because Meryll and Leslie were so engaging. While they had a natural rapport with the audience, you could also tell they had prepared well so they could connect with our particular group's interests. I learned a lot from listening to them, and I found their sisterly interaction unique and fun. If you want an enlightening and uplifting experience, attend one of their book talks."
Lisa Shimoni, Modiin Israel

Book Review

"Truly, you have written a story that makes accessible the reality of existence in Russia, through the eyes of individuals who lived through the various regimes and dictates.  It is fascinating and very well told.  As I read Vera and Alla's story, I learned more Russian history than I had known from a textbook.  That's a big deal, women!  You tell the tale with vivid detail and hook us on the two women and their stories, then weave in the history to illuminate their journeys. It is such a necessary book.  I am thrilled that the two of you collaborated, as I can see the uniqueness of your personalities come through in the stories, and that, too, makes the book a gem."
Margaret Leibfried, Danielson Group consultant

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