The U.S. Should Discourage Its Arab Allies from Reconciling with Syria
Providing loopholes to American sanctions won’t end the war.
October 11, 2021
Osip Mandelstam Reclaimed His Jewish Heritage When He Rediscovered His Poetic Voice and Turned against Soviet Tyranny
But a new biography argues that the poet wasn’t very Jewish or even very anti-Soviet.
In pre-Revolutionary Russia, Osip Mandelstam was a leading figure in the poetic movement known as Acmeism; he went on to be one of the preeminent poets of the Soviet Union, until, in 1933—frustrated by his country’s increasing repressiveness—he read a friend a poem mocking Stalin. He spent the following years under various forms of arrest, until dying of typhoid fever in a Siberian labor camp. In his early work, Mandelstam rarely mentioned his Jewish upbringing or addressed Jewish themes, but eventually that changed. Reviewing a recent biography, Gary Saul Morson writes:
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Needlessly Condemning Israel Hasn’t Bought France the Good Will of Its Restive Muslim Population
Double standards on terrorism.
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Osip Mandelstam Reclaimed His Jewish Heritage When He Rediscovered His Poetic Voice and Turned against Soviet Tyranny
But a new biography argues that the poet wasn’t very Jewish or even very anti-Soviet.