Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity.(Review) (book review)

Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, by Steven J. Zipperstein. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, xii+139 pp.

Walking around the Lower East Side in New York City or le Marais in Pars, one cannot help but feel nostalgic for the "world of our fathers." A recent surge of interest in Yiddish culture, klezmer, and shtetl life represents a longing for a past that most American Jews either did not kow, or one they would not appreciate if they were to live it firsthand. Part of what it means to be a Jew in America today is to have (an often misplaced)