Authors

Discussion

The tragedy of disappearing Jewish culture and memory is a central theme in the work of Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002). His complex life reflects the fragmented identity of Soviet Jews — his father was repressed during the Great Terror, and his mother died during evacuation in World War II. Therefore Gorenstein’s works confront the deeply rooted ethnic tensions in Soviet society and anti-Semitism amid the proclaimed ‘friendship of peoples’. His prose reveal cultural strategies that expose and deconstruct colonial practices.

A symbol of Soviet Jewry and a microcosm of the broader Jewish world, for Gorenstein, becomes the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv, where the author himself spent his formative years and to which he dedicated several works. Once called the ‘Jewish Paris’ by Sholem Aleichem, this city was a vital hub of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe. However, during the Soviet era, its significance distorted by historical tragedies and political oppression.

Gorenstein’s prose captures and examines Jewish spaces and their transformations within the Soviet context, where these spaces evolve amid the tensions between neighboring Ukrainian and Russian communities and influence of the Soviet state. In Redemption (1967), the unnamed Soviet Ukrainian town, recognizable as Berdychiv, bears the scars of the Holocaust and pogroms, its ruined homes juxtaposed with improvised graves and Soviet institutions. In the play Berdychiv, we see how baroque buildings have morphed into communal apartments, Jewish cemeteries have been converted into parks, set against a backdrop of Soviet factories and former POW camps. 

In Traveling Companions, Berdychiv evolves into an ‘imagined’ Berdychiv — a symbol of a disrupted homeland. The protagonist merely passes by on a train, mourning the disappearance of this culture along with his own identity. The train station serves as a recurring motif in Gorenstein’s texts, symbolizing displacement — a lifeline for escaping the violence of totalitarian regimes and everyday anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, it is closely connected to assimilation and the subsequent fading of cultural memory.