The Stubbornly Jewish Worldview of the Soviet-Era Writer Friedrich Gorenstein

Friedrich Gorenstein (1932-2002) is a major figure in the history of 20th-century Russian literature—and a most curious one. On the one hand, his novels blend fiction with religion, philosophy, and politics in a way that is quintessentially Russian, reminiscent of writers from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Chekhov and, in the 20th century, Andrei Platonov. On the other hand, throughout his voluminous body of work, he defiantly tackles those selfsame issues as a Jewish writer, a Jewish thinker, and an uncompromising Jewish voice.

Until now all but unknown in English, this daring and complex author has at last been brought to the attention of American readers with the recent publication of Redemption, his first major novel, in a masterful translation by Andrew Bromfield.

Gorenstein’s life story replicates the grim travails of Soviet history. His father, a prominent academic in Kiev, was arrested in 1935 and sent to the Gulag where he soon perished. At the start of World War II, his mother died unexpectedly during the family’s evacuation to Central Asia, leaving Friedrich in an orphanage and later in the care of his aunts in Berdichev, Ukraine, where he returned after the combined atrocities of the war and the Holocaust had done their worst.