The Jew in imperial Russia and the case of Avraam Uri Kovner

"Identity Theft focuses on the life and writing of Avraam Uri Kovner. As one of the fiery Jewish nihilists of his generation, variously a critic, author, and bank embezzler, Kovner embodies the problem of identity as a series of translations across cultural boundaries. His life reveals how Jewish acculturation in Imperial Russia could be perceived as identity theft. Kovner, who initiated modern Hebrew criticism, published two novels in Russian, as well as a weekly column in a widely read Russian newspaper. He forged a bank check and became notorious in the Russian press as an example of the danger integration of the Jews represented to Russian society. From prison, and later in exile, Kovner defended the Jews in a series of letters to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vasilii Rozanov, both of whom vilified Jews in their writings. Ostracized by both the Jewish and the Russian communities, he mimed and at the same time undermined rigid stereotypes of Jewish and Russian behavior, pointing out the uneasy interdependence of the two cultures he inhabited." "This book examines the interdependence of Russian and Jewish literature and culture, showing how Russian-Jewish writers of the late nineteenth century used literature to imagine the fusion of disparate identities. The reexamination of Jewish life in Imperial Russia is an important new direction in Russian and Jewish studies, and this book makes a significant contribution to that effort by focusing on a renegade who traversed both the Jewish and the Russian worlds."--BOOK JACKET.