In Search of a New Jewish Art: Leonid Pasternak in Jerusalem

Abstract

1 Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, Zapisi raznykh let (Notes of Various Years) (Moscow, 1975) (Russian). These memoirs were edited by Pasternak’s children, Josephine and Alexander. In 2013, Pasternak’s grandson, Evgenii Pasternak, published (in cooperation with his wife, Elena Vladimirovna Pasternak) a collection of Leonid Pasternak’s writings In early 1924, Leonid Pasternak received a somewhat strange proposal from the publisher Alexander Kogan. Surprisingly, this story was not censored during the preparation of Pasternak’s memoir, which was published in Moscow some thirty years after his death and contained no trace of his connections with Jewish culture.1 The following passage is sandwiched between portraits of Russian musicians from the early twentieth century: